Abandon

She said, “Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t you jerk on the rod before it moved?”

“Yeah. I’m impressed you noticed. See, by the time you feel the tap, it’s too late. He’s already checked it out, realized it’s bullshit.”

“So how’d you know?”

“Caught him rising to my elk-hair caddis, saw it vanish, pulled to set the hook.”

“No idea what you just said, but it was a lovely thing to watch.”

Scott climbed onto the bank, sat down on a carpet of moss. He opened a small box containing an assortment of flies, Abigail now close enough to read the tattoo that wrapped around his arm above the bicep: MARIA 2.11.78–5.15.04 R.I.P.

She bent down to the stream, cupped a handful of freezing water, and as she brought it to her mouth, Scott yelled, “No!”

She glanced back at him, letting the water run through her fingers.

“Notice something about the rocks along the bank below the fork?” he asked.

“You mean how they’re covered with orange algae?”

“That’s not algae. It’s a mineral deposit, a visual marker for streams with high metal content—zinc, aluminum, lead.”

“So this water’s toxic?”

“Yep. That’s why I’m fishing upstream from that tributary. It probably runs out of an old mine.” He lifted the rod. “So, you wanna give it a shot? See if you can hook one?”

Five minutes later, they stood casting together, Abigail thinking this was like those cheesy scenes in the movies when the guy shows the girl how to work a pool cue. But she didn’t care. As their arms moved together, his body against hers, she thought of her recent string of New York men—beautiful metrosexual train wrecks. Scott didn’t strike her as one of those superficial predators she always seemed to be falling for, and for the first time since leaving New York, she didn’t want to be home.

They sat around a fire, eating trout that had been seasoned with fresh spices and seared on a stone among the embers. There was vegetable soup and a baguette, and over the flames, Lawrence roasted whole green chilies stuffed with cheese. He’d also smuggled in a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon. They all agreed—one of the best meals they’d ever had.

After supper, everyone washed their dishes in the stream until their hands had gone numb in the icy water. By the time they returned to the fire, Jerrod had stoked the flames into a big blaze. Abigail leaned back in her camp chair, noting the ache in her legs, the blisters on her hips. When she looked up, she saw the cinders rising out of the flames and through the spruce branches toward the night sky.

Lawrence pulled a flask from the pocket of his fleece jacket and offered it to June. She unscrewed the cap, took a swig, passed it to her husband.

A cloud of smoke gathered around Scott’s head, and he asked, “Anyone else want dessert?”

The whiskey burned Abigail’s throat. She took another sip, sent up a prayer of thanks when the glow settled in, dulling the pain ten hard miles had inflicted on her body.

Lawrence got stoned and slipped into his professorial tone, going on about the history of the ghost town, even reading from the diary of someone who’d lived in Abandon, a woman named Gloria Curtice. But Abigail was too beat, and her mind wandered for the next half hour, only perking up when he told the story of the vanishing, how a man had ridden into Abandon in January of 1894 in search of his missing younger brother, a mule skinner named Brady Sykes, only to find the town empty, not a chimney smoking, the stamp mill silent.

“I’m not talking about empty homes where people packed all their belongings and left. This town of a hundred and twenty-three souls just up and disappeared on Christmas Day.”

Emmett asked, “So what happened to the mule skinner’s brother?”

Lawrence expelled a lungful of smoke. “Did what any of us would’ve done. Hauled ass out of there. Few days later, he did an interview with the Silverton Standard and Miner. Said the whole ordeal had really spooked him, that the town felt strange, haunted, like the dev il had been there. Everyone assumed they’d find the remains of Abandon in the summer, when the snow was gone, but they never recovered a single bone.”

“That’s f**ked-up,” Scott said.

“So what do you think happened, Lawrence?” Emmett asked.

“To the town?”

“Yeah.”

The professor sighed, seemed to reflect on the question for a moment, then said confidentially, “I’ve never shared this with anyone”—Emmett and June imperceptibly leaned forward—“but I think a big spaceship came down, abducted the whole lot of them.”

“Really?”

Lawrence smiled.

“Oh, a joke,” Emmett said.

“Sorry, but you have to understand—I’ve been asked what happened to Abandon probably a thousand times, and I just don’t know the answer. There are some loony-tunes out there who believe the town was taken by aliens or that something supernatural happened.”

“What about a virus?” June asked.

“Bad ones were around in the 1890s, but lead poisoning would’ve been a greater threat to Abandon than an epidemic, what with their drinking water flowing out of the heart of these mountains. But assuming some super-virus struck the town, where are the remains? In the absence of any bones, I guess I can see how a person might look to supernatural explanations.”

“Even you?” Emmett said.

“In all honesty, I do have a theory, but it’s, well, personal, and I haven’t shared it with anyone ever, and don’t plan to now.”

Scott stood, took the water bag hanging from a knob on a tree, and doused the fire.

It hissed, bellows of steam lifting into the trees, cold rushing in.

“Sorry, folks, but tomorrow comes early.”

The others said their good nights and lumbered off to bed. Then just Abigail and Lawrence sat across from each other in the darkness.

She got up as soon as she realized it, said, “Night.”

Lawrence stared at the last unyielding coal, scratching his gray beard.

“Sit out here with me awhile,” he said without looking up.

“I would, really, but I’m cold and tired.”

“Abigail.”

“What?”

“I just wanted to—”

“I know, but I can’t do this right now, okay? I’m not there yet.”

Their campsite glade stood fifty yards through the trees. Abigail had to pee again, but the thought of squatting out here in the dark seemed worse than the pressure in her bladder. She climbed into her one-man tent, her sleeping bag freezing. She crawled inside the down bag and zipped herself up, pulled her long black hair into a ponytail. It reeked of wood smoke. The walk from the campfire to the tent had set her pulse racing, and she listened to the throbbing in her head. When it eased, the hush came. Even on weekends in New York, lying in bed in her studio apartment, the nearest thing to silence contained the noise of sirens and central heating, her refrigerator cutting on and off in the predawn hours. Here, the silence was a vacuum, a total absence. It made her uneasy.