The Influence Read online

  The Influence

  Bentley Little

  Cemetery Dance Publications

  Baltimore

  2013

  Copyright © 2013 by Bentley Little

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Cemetery Dance Publications

  132-B Industry Lane, Unit #7

  Forest Hill, MD 21050

  http://www.cemeterydance.com

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any similarity to real persons, living or dead,

  is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  First Cemetery Dance Digital Edition, October 2013

  ISBN: 978-1-58767-430-3

  Cover Artwork & Design © 2013 by Elder Lemon Design

  Digital Design by Dan Hocker

  For Judson, my brother

  ONE

  Karma? What a crock of shit.

  When his sister Alma and her husband Jay had needed a co-signer so they could buy a house in Mesa, Ross had been there for them. He’d even ponied up $5,000 he couldn’t really afford in order to help with the down payment. And when his brother Rick’s pothead son Kevin was arrested for attempted arson in Texas, Ross had cabled the boy the money for bail and paid for Rick’s plane ticket to Austin, as well as a significant percentage of the lawyer’s fees. Not to mention the loan he’d given to his Aunt Melissa when her husband ran off with his secretary, or the “presents” he’d given to far-flung relatives who’d fallen on hard times, or the many instances when he’d picked up barely known offshoots of his family tree at the airport and given them a place to stay.

  So when he lost his job at Air Research, Ross naturally thought that everyone would be there for him. But when a year passed and he still couldn’t find another job, when he began gently hinting that he could use a little help to tide him over, his brother and sister suddenly started making themselves scarce. And all of those other relatives? Conspicuously absent.

  Even his parents.

  So much for the idea that sending out good stuff brought back good stuff in return.

  It was his cousin Lita who finally came through for him.

  He hadn’t seen Lita in probably ten years, although they’d been close as children. She’d lived in New Mexico, but every summer, her family would come out to Phoenix for a week or two. They’d spend hot afternoons in air-conditioned movie theaters, and have evening picnics by Canyon Lake or the Salt River. They would always set aside one morning for the zoo and botanical gardens, and one day they would always spend at the amusement park Legend City. It was vacation-as-routine, but to Ross, as a child, there was something comforting about that. He knew what to expect and he looked forward to it. Lita did, too.

  He’d been in seventh or eighth grade when Lita and her family had stopped coming, at an age where he didn’t want to acknowledge that he even had a family, let alone spend time with them. Even so, though he’d never admitted it to anyone, he missed her, and the subsequent summers had never seemed as magical or fun. He’d seen her periodically after that—at her mother’s remarriage, at their grandmother’s funeral—but while they spoke and were cordial, the closeness they’d once shared was no longer there.

  So it was a surprise when, one early October morning, out of the blue, she called to check up on him. She’d heard from her mom, who’d heard from Ross’ mom, that he’d lost his job and had been out of work for the past year, and unlike the other selfish, self-involved narcissists who called themselves his family, she actually seemed concerned. He didn’t want to burden Lita with the full extent of his financial problems—his savings were practically gone, his unemployment checks were scheduled to stop soon, and he was going to have to sell his condo (if he could in this market) and move to a smaller apartment in a cheaper area of the Valley because he couldn’t keep up the payments—but under her determined questioning, he buckled, confessing all.

  “I have an idea,” she told him when he was finished.

  “Yeah?” he said wearily.

  “You should take a few months off and come visit.” There was a teasing quality to her voice that he remembered from childhood and that made him feel as though no time had passed and they were both ten years old. She wasn’t joking, however, and while her approach was playful, her intent was to give him some financial breathing room. She suggested renting out his condo in order to earn some extra money to help keep up the payments. That way, he’d still have the place when he did find a job. In the meantime, he could spend a few months in Magdalena with her and her husband. They had over an acre, and there was a shotgun shack on the property where they’d lived while they were building the house. He was more than welcome to use it.

  Ross demurred. “Thank you,” he said sincerely. “That’s very generous of you. But I can’t—”

  “This is me you’re talking to.”

  “I still need to look for work,” he told her. “And I don’t think I’ll find too many engineering positions in…Where do you live? Magdalena?”

  “What are you talking about? We have train tracks not twenty miles from here. Joking! I know what kind of engineer you mean. And I also know that you’re not pounding the pavement for a job like that. You’re emailing resumes. You can do that from here. We have internet access.”

  “I have to show up in person to get my unemployment.”

  Lita was silent for a moment. “Okay,” she said. “You’re off the hook. For now. But the offer’s open. When your unemployment runs out, come on over and take a break from the rat race. We’ve got plenty of space, and we’d love to have you. And I’m serious. Think about renting out rather than selling. This is just a temporary setback. You don’t want to lose everything you’ve worked for just because of a little bad luck.”

  He was touched. As much by the reconnection as by her genuine kindness and generosity, especially in comparison with the rest of his family. “Thank you,” he said simply.

  “I have an idea,” she suggested. “Why don’t you come down for a visit? A weekend. We haven’t seen each other in ages. It would be good to catch up.”

  He immediately thought of twenty reasons not to go—starting with the price of gas—but to his surprise, he said yes. He wanted to see Lita again. And get to know her husband, whom he’d only met once. And maybe he would take a sabbatical from real life, drop out of society and live off the grid for a couple of weeks. It would give him a chance to think about the future, to make plans without a gun to his head.

  “All right!” Lita said, and she said it the same way she had when she was a little girl. He found himself smiling into the phone. “Got a piece of paper?” she asked. “Let me give you directions…”

  ****

  Magdalena was a small town in southeastern Arizona, only a desert mountain range away from Mexico and closer to the New Mexico border than to Tucson. Getting to it was far more difficult than it should have been in this MapQuest world, but then again the information superhighway had been paid much more attention to in the last few decades than had real highways, so perhaps it should not have come as a surprise. Past Benson, past Willcox, Interstate 10 was clear all the way to New Mexico, according to the road signs. But, following his cousin’s directions, Ross pulled off on the anonymously marked “Exit 96” and took the bleached two-lane blacktop south.

  Ten miles in, he passed an abandoned gas station, and twenty miles further on, he saw a small hill atop which someone had erected a giant white cross, although there was no other trace of human habitation.

  Somewhere along the
line, the pavement seemed to have faded away, and Ross was not sure if he was now travelling down a dirt road or over asphalt that had been retaken by the desert after battling the sandstorms that hit disproportionately this section of the state.

  There were no signs indicating that any town lay ahead, nothing even telling him how many miles to the Mexican border. He’d been off the highway for an hour and was about to take out his cell phone and try calling Lita to make sure he was on the right track (that is, if he could get a signal out here), when ahead, at the base of one of the low rocky mountains that blocked the edge of the horizon, he saw a flash of reflected sunlight. It disappeared as the road dipped, then reappeared as his car topped a small rise. There was more than one glinting object, and he realized that they were probably the metal roofs or water towers of a town.

  He was still many miles away, but as he drew closer, he saw darker objects between the bright flashes, buildings, and, eventually, a white “M” on the sloping brush-covered side of the chimney-peaked mountain directly behind the town.

  Magdalena.

  Lita and her husband really had dropped out of the rat race. This was about as remote a location as she could have found anywhere. And while there was something admirable about that, and while the rugged desert was undeniably beautiful, Ross felt an odd twinge of discomfort. He was a city boy, Phoenix born and raised. To him, the wilderness was somewhere you visited on vacation, not the place where you lived. Still, though he might not want to reside here permanently, it might be a fun spot for some R & R while he sorted out his options.

  He slowed the car. Referring to Magdalena as a “small town” was giving it the benefit of the doubt. More of a village or hamlet, it appeared to have one main street, the road he was on, which dead-ended past what looked like an old adobe church and seemed to turn into a hiking trail that wound up the side of the mountain. What he supposed was the downtown consisted of a handful of small businesses and houses, in addition to a slightly larger market with an independent gas station in its parking lot.

  Ross glanced down at the directions on the seat next to him. Lita had said her home was down the second dirt road on the right. He turned on the road, passed a shabby beauty salon, three or four ramshackle houses, then was back in open country, where, three miles past a cattleguard, just where she’d said it would be, he saw an old-style metal mailbox with the number 11 stenciled in black on the side. Following her instructions, he turned left at the mailbox and drove down a rutted dirt driveway to a surprisingly new ranch house that seemed completely at odds with the surrounding community. To the left of the house was a corral and, beyond that, a long low building that resembled a barn. Lita and her husband, apparently, were ranchers.

  Ross parked next to a dusty pickup in front of the house. He’d promised to be here for lunch, but he’d left later than he’d planned and the journey had proved longer than expected. It was now after two. He hoped they’d eaten already and hadn’t been waiting on him.

  Lita emerged from the house, alerted by the slamming car door as he alighted from the vehicle. She greeted him with an excited squeal, running up and throwing her arms around him in a big hug. Dave, her husband, stood shyly on the porch.

  Lita had barely changed in the decade since he’d seen her. Her hair was shorter and lighter in color, but even a life lived outdoors had put no wrinkles on her face, and he was suddenly conscious of the fact that he’d chubbed up quite a bit in the past year.

  “It’s so great to see you!” she enthused. She nudged his belly with an elbow. “Put on a few pounds, I see.”

  “Junk food’ll do that to you. Junk food and stress.”

  “Speaking of food, I’ll bet you’re starving. Or did you eat on the way?”

  “No. The trip was a little longer than I thought.”

  “I should’ve warned you about that. Come on in.” She led the way up the porch steps. “You remember Dave.”

  Ross shook hands with Lita’s husband, who smiled and said, “Nice to see you again.”

  The two of them had eaten, but Lita had made gumbo and kept it warm in a crock pot. Dave, a big man, said he was hungry again and joined Ross as he ate. Lita drank iced tea and reminisced with Ross about places no longer there, like Legend City and the below ground movie theater in Los Arcos mall. Laughing at the memory of their visit to South Mountain’s Mystery Castle, where the tour guide had forbidden an overly curious Ross from asking any more questions, she admitted that she’d never had a subsequent summer vacation as fun as the ones she’d spent with his family.

  “Why did you stop coming?” he wondered. “I never understood that. Money?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe. Partly. But my parents weren’t getting along much then, and it was kind of the beginning of the end. They got divorced when I was fifteen, and after that I lived with my mom and the problem was definitely money.”

  “I missed you,” Ross said.

  She smiled, put her hand on his. “I missed you, too.”

  She asked about the rest of his family, his parents, his brother and sister, and he told her the truth, the unvarnished version.

  “I never liked your sister,” Lita admitted. “That’s why I always hung out with you and your brother. Although him I could take or leave, to be honest with you. Maybe because he was older than we were. He always seemed like he was doing us a big favor just by gracing us with his presence.”

  “That was Rick. Still is.”

  “Remember that time you two got in a fight and you sprained your wrist?”

  “I remember.”

  “What was that thing you always used to say when you were trying to be tough? ‘I’ll kick your ass to pay for Friday?’”

  Ross laughed.

  “What did that even mean?”

  “I have no idea. I just thought it sounded cool.”

  “It made you sound like a dork!”

  “Well, what about you?”

  “What about me?”

  He tried to come up with a corresponding embarrassment for her but couldn’t do it under pressure and gave up, laughing. “All right. I was the dork.”

  Ross was glad he’d come, and after finishing his late lunch, he was taken on a tour of the house and property by Lita and Dave. It was indeed a ranch and even had a name, the L Bar-D. Dave, who’d grown up in Sonoita, the son of a cattleman who’d gone broke and made a midlife career change to become a postal worker, dreamed of owning a herd of cows. At the moment he and Lita had only a horse, a goat, several hives of bees, which provided the organic honey they sold, and a coop full of chickens, which supplied the eggs from which they received most of their admittedly small income.

  “But we don’t need much,” Dave insisted. “We live simply.”

  Beaming, Lita took her husband’s hand. “And happily.”

  The shack where they’d lived while the house was being built, and where Ross would be sleeping, was to the left of the chicken coop and much cuter than the word “shack” had led him to believe. A prefab structure they’d bought and put together themselves, it was basically set up like an efficiency apartment, with a counter separating the small cooking space from the living/sleeping area, and a closet-sized bathroom containing a toilet, a sink and a narrow shower. Lita had kept the place up—like a guestroom, Ross supposed—and he had to admit that it was pretty nice. He even had a view of the open desert through the front windows.

  Lita nudged him with her elbow. “Admit it, Rossie. Not a bad place to stay, is it?”

  No one had called him “Rossie” since he was a kid, and hearing it now made him feel old.

  “It’s nice,” he admitted.

  Despite his initial reservations, Ross enjoyed the weekend. He thought he’d be bored, but while the pace of life was slower than in Phoenix—much slower—it was relaxing. Besides, Lita and Dave had DirectTV and internet access, so it wasn’t as though he was completely cut off from the real world. Monday morning, as he prepared to depart, he actually felt sad to be leaving.r />
  Lita poked her head through the open car window as he was about to go. “Promise me, if things don’t work out, if you run out of money, if you don’t find a job before your benefits expire, if you just need a place to clear your head, that you’ll call. I’m serious. Your shack will be sitting here waiting. And, as you can see, we have plenty of room. It’d be good for you.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “I had a great time. And I appreciate everything you’ve done. Both of you.”

  “Promise me,” she repeated.

  He smiled at her. “I promise.”

  TWO

  Ross kept his promise—and much sooner than he’d intended.

  Despite the state of the economy, despite all of the personal setbacks of the past year, he’d honestly thought he had a shot at getting hired by McDowell Industries, an aerospace firm based in Houston. They’d accepted his resume two months ago, and while he hadn’t been called for an interview, the personnel director had phoned himself and assured Ross that he was on the short list. So it was quite a blow when, the day after Halloween, he received a generic rejection, a one-line email notifying him that the position had been filled.

  The unexpected news caused him to take stock, and Ross decided that if he was going to take advantage of his cousin’s offer, he should do so sooner rather than later, while he still had money coming in and could pay some of his own expenses, before he became a complete leech and freeloader. The prospect still didn’t sit well with him, but being able to contribute made it a lot more palatable, and in the back of his mind was the idea that he could get some sort of part-time or seasonal job in the area—manual labor or a service position—that would enable him to pull his own weight.

  At least he didn’t have a huge debt hanging over his head. Another supervisor, Alex Yoon, who’d gotten laid off the same time as Ross and who had also not yet found employment, had been using his credit cards to see him through the past year. Now they were all maxed out, and he couldn’t even make the minimum payments. A financial advisor had told him that the only option left was personal bankruptcy.