“In which case I’ll be dealing with two big deals.” The chief ranger set his mouth in a hard line, his mustache hiding his upper lip. He set off across the pavement after the loader. Turning and walking backward for a few steps as he departed, he said, “Don’t go anywhere, either of you. I’ll have plenty to ask you about when I get back.”
3
Chuck and Janelle crossed the parking lot after Sanford disappeared up the trail.
“I shouldn’t have gotten into it with those guys,” he said. “Sorry.”
“I need more than just another ‘sorry’ from you. I need an attitude adjustment.” She shook her head. “Dios. It’s like I’ve got two loco teenagers in the family instead of just one.”
“I won’t do it again. I promise.”
“That’s the second time today you’ve said that.”
He glanced at the sky. The sleet was letting up as the leading edge of the storm passed, but the cold wind continued out of the north, harsh and stinging. He shoved his hands deep in his jacket pockets. Ahead, a group of more than two dozen elderly campers wearing hooded rain jackets huddled together at the entrance to the campground, the wind pressing their polyester slacks against their legs.
A tall man at the front of the group frowned at Chuck and Janelle as they approached. “What the hell’s going on?” he demanded.
The man’s jacket hood was pushed back, revealing thinning silver hair dotted with sleet. His shoulders were stooped with age. Even so, he was taller than everyone else around him by several inches. His face was bounded by a cleft jaw, jutting cheekbones, and a high aquiline forehead.
Chuck and Janelle stopped in front of the group. The campers stood in obvious male-female pairs. Most of the couples sported matching insulated raincoats. Some of the women wore their hoods up. The men were bareheaded, like the man who’d spoken.
All the gathered campers were white and all were elderly, ranging in age, as best Chuck could tell, from their late sixties into their eighties. Several of them gripped pairs of telescoping hiking poles with their gloved hands. One man leaned on a sculpted wooden walking stick that rose as high as his head.
Janelle answered the tall man. “That’s what the first responders are here to find out.”
A woman standing next to the man asked, “Is it safe?”
The woman’s face was heavily lined, her mouth turned down in what appeared to be a perpetual pout. Wire-rimmed glasses high on the bridge of her nose framed her watery blue eyes. She was taller than the other women standing around her, but still several inches shorter than the man beside her.
The tall man rolled his eyes at the woman. “Martha,” he carped. “Get a grip, would you?”
Martha lowered her head until her hood hid her face.
The tall man focused his ire on Janelle. “That’s not much of an answer, young lady.”
Janelle’s voice remained calm when she responded to Martha. “If there was any danger, I’m sure they’d have warned us by now.”
“That rumbling we heard earlier,” another man asked. “What was that all about?”
This man was short and round. His navy jacket draped like a skirt from his broad waistline. A thin strip of gray hair rimmed his otherwise bald head. His brown eyes glistened behind thick glasses speckled with water.
“Quite right, Frank,” said a woman next to him. “And now, all the bump-bump-bumping has stopped.”
Frank turned to the woman. “Why, you’re right, Nora. The bumping noise has gone away, hasn’t it?”
Nora nodded. Her face, caked with makeup, was shrouded by the hood of her navy jacket, the same style and color as the one worn by Frank. She peered at Janelle from beneath her hood, her brown eyes as large as those of an owl. “Miss?”
“Maybe they’ll tell us when they come back,” Janelle said.
The tall man with silver hair thrust out his chest. “They’d damn well better. We deserve an explanation. They’ve got us trapped here.” He aimed an accusatory finger at the emergency vehicles abandoned haphazardly in the parking lot. “I couldn’t get my Country Rambler through that mess if I tried.”
“There, there, Harold,” Martha said, patting his arm. “We’ve got our tow-behind. We could squeeze right through with it if we needed to. But it’s not as if we’re planning to go anywhere today.”
Harold harrumphed and jerked his arm away from her. “That’s not the point, Martha. The point is, I can’t leave, we can’t leave, even if we wanted to. It’s just what you’d expect from the government, taking advantage of the little guy.” Harold turned to the bald man, looming over him. “Isn’t that right, Frank?”
Frank nodded his round head vigorously. “You got that right, Harold. We’re just pawns to them.”
“That’s how it always is.” Harold swung his hand in an arc, indicating the vehicles arrayed in the parking lot. “It’s you and me, Frank, who paid for all of those things.” His eyes flicked from one man in the group to the next. “All of us hardworking guys did.”
Frank ticked his rubbery chin up and down. “Don’t you know it, Harold,” he said. “Don’t you just know it.”
The other men nodded along with Frank, their arms cordoned across their chests.
Harold continued his tirade. “We cough up the taxes they demand of us so they can buy their fancy fire trucks and ambulances. But do they even know we exist? Do they care? Of course not.”
Frank and the other men in the group kept their eyes on Harold, while Martha, Nora, and the other women at the men’s sides gazed into the distance, stone-faced.
Chuck and Janelle slipped past the group and on into the campground. When they were out of earshot of the elderly campers, he said, “You set a good example for me back there, keeping your cool with that guy.”
“Imagine that.”
“I’m learning,” Chuck said. “I’ll do better.”
She snorted. “Sure you will.”
They passed the massive motor homes one by one. The coaches, polished to a high sheen, lined both sides of the campground drive. Droplets of melted sleet beaded the roofs and clung to the windows and sides of the recreational vehicles, glittering like jewels beneath the overcast sky.
“Those things cost hundreds of thousands of dollars each,” Chuck said of the RVs. “For all that guy’s complaints, I’ll bet his accountant keeps him from paying much, if anything, in the way of taxes.”
In front of each motor home sat a miniature sport utility vehicle, detached from its tow position behind the RV and parked in front for day-to-day use.
Janelle tipped her head at the coaches and mini SUVs. “They can afford their expensive toys, but they sure love to whine about the cost of their emergency services. You should hear them if we show up at their homes in our ambulance more than five minutes after they call. ‘Where have you been?’ ‘What took you so long?’ They go bonkers.”
Chuck counted more than twenty motor homes lining the drive, taking up most of the sites in the campground. Besides the spot occupied by his and Janelle’s hard-sided trailer, a handful of pup tents and small, pop-up, canvas-walled trailers occupied the few remaining campsites.
“I thought we’d have the place pretty much to ourselves