False Memory

A trick of shadows. Surely, surely. Yet… no. This wasn’t mere illusion.

She was certain that she was wide-awake, as certain as she had ever been about anything in her life. And yet he stood there, only ten or twelve feet away, having carried her out of the nightmare of seething fire.

The dream world and the world in which this hotel room existed suddenly seemed equally valid, parts of the same reality, separated by a veil even thinner than the curtain of sleep. Here was truth, pure and piercing, as we are seldom given the chance to glimpseit, and Martie was breathless, transfixed by awareness.

She wanted to go to him but was restrained by a curious sense of propriety, by an innate understanding that his world was his and her world hers, that this temporary intersection of the two worlds was an ephemeral condition, a grace that she must not abuse.

In his shadows, the fireman — and also watchman — appeared to nod approvingly at her restraint. She thought she saw the luminosity of teeth revealed in the crescent of a familiar and beloved smile.

She returned to bed, head propped on two pillows, and pulled the covers to her chin. Her face was no longer hot, and the scent of smoke was gone.

The nightstand clock showed 3:35 in the morning. She doubted that she would be able to sleep any more.

Wonderingly, she looked toward those special shadows, and still he was there.

She smiled and nodded and closed her eyes, and when in a little while she heard the distinctive squeak of his rubber fireboots and the rustle of his turnout coat, she didn’t open her eyes. Nor did she open them when she felt the asbestos fireglove touch her head, nor when he smoothed her hair against the pillow.

Although Martie had expected to lie restless for the remainder of the night, a particularly peaceful sleep overcame her, until she stirred again more than an hour later, in the predawn stillness, just minutes before the wake-up call was due from the hotel operator.

She could no longer detect even the faintest trace of the scent of smoke, and no visitor stood watch in the satiny shadows. She was living in one world again, her world, so familiar, fearsome, and yet full of promise.

She couldn’t prove to anyone else what had been real in the night and what had not, but to her own satisfaction, the truth was clear.

As the bedside phone rang with their wake-up call, she knew that she would never see Smilin’ Bob again in this world, but she wondered how soon she would see him in his, whether in fifty years or sometime tomorrow.

64

High deserts seldom offer warmth in winter, and on Thursday morning at the Santa Fe Municipal Airport, the plane brought Martie and Dusty down into cold dry air, to a pale land as windless now as the surface of the moon.

They had carried both small pieces of luggage onto the flight, after the bag with the toy fire engine had passed inspection at the security gate in Orange County. With no need to visit the baggage carousel, they went directly to the car-rental agency.

Getting into the two-door Ford, Martie inhaled an orange grove’s worth of citrus-scented air freshener. Yet the fragrance could not entirely mask the underlying noxiousness of stale cigarette smoke.

On Cerrillos Road, as Dusty drove into the city, Martie removed the brass screws from the bottom of the fire truck. She extracted the felt shoe bag from the truck, and the pistol from the shoe bag.

“You want to carry?” she asked Dusty.

“No, you go ahead.”

Dusty had ordered the supertuned Springfield Armory Champion, a version of the Colt Commander produced by Springfield’s custom shop, with numerous aftermarket parts. Featuring a beveled magazine well, a throated barrel, a lowered and flared ejection port, a Novak low-mount combat sight, a polished feed ramp, a polished extractor and ejector, and an A-i style trigger tuned to a 4.5-pound pull, the seven-shot pistol was lightweight, compact, and easy to control.

Initially she had been opposed to owning the gun. After having fired two thousand rounds during a dozen visits to a shooting range, however, she’d proved to be somewhat more effective with the weapon than Dusty was, which surprised her more than it surprised him.

She slipped the pistol into her purse. This wasn’t the ideal way to carry it, because making a quick and unhampered draw wasn’t possible. Dusty had researched holsters, strictly for use on the shooting range, but he hadn’t gotten around to selecting one yet.

Because she was wearing blue jeans, a navy-blue sweater, and a blue tweed jacket, Martie could have tucked the gun under her belt, either against her abdomen or in the small of her back, and concealed it with the sweater. In either case, the discomfort factor would be too high, so the purse was the only choice.

“We’re now officially outlaws,” she said, leaving the central compartment of the purse unzipped, for easier access.

“We were already outlaws the moment we boarded the plane.”

“Yeah, well, now we’re outlaws in New Mexico, too.”

“How’s it feel?”