Free Fire - C. J. Box [72]
“None taken,” Demming said, tight-lipped.
“Any other problems with them? What about the drug allegations?”
“Nothing I know of, and I mean that. That’s not to say all of my people are clean. It’s like any other work situation; there’s a percentage of bad apples. But no more than any workplace in the outside world and less than some. Hell, I went to school in Madison, at the University of Wisconsin. Ranger Layborn could really ply his craft there.”
“Not even marijuana?” Joe asked. “There seemed to be drug references in the e-mails he sent. ‘Flamers,’ he called them.”
Cutler shrugged. “Again, I can’t swear he wasn’t smoking, but I never saw or heard anything that would confirm it. As you know, there’s a certain attitude and culture that goes with drug use, and he didn’t seem to be a part of it. He was pretty tightly wound at times—kind of naively idealistic about environmental issues. But drugs, that would surprise me.”
Cutler turned the pickup off the highway at the Upper Geyser Basin and parked it in the empty lot. Joe trailed him while Demming remained in the pickup to report to the Pagoda on the truck radio. The smell of hot sulfur and water was overwhelming.Cutler explained that the pools on either side of the boardwalk were 190 degrees, and the water temperature could be gauged by the color of the bacteria in the runoff—white beinghottest, green and blue cooler but still too hot to touch. Usingthe slotted spoon, he carefully picked up coins that had been tossed into the thermals and handed them back to Joe, who juggled them from hand to hand until they cooled off enough to inspect. Three pennies and a dime. The pennies were already gray with a buildup of manganese and zinc from the water, Cutlersaid, but the dime, being silver, was unblemished.
Cutler swung over the side of the railing and landed with a thump on the white-crust surface. He urged Joe to follow him.
“What about the ‘Stay on the Boardwalk’ signs?” Joe asked, knowing the ground was unstable near geysers and the crust was brittle. Horror stories abounded of pets and visitors who wandered off the pathway.
“And if I break through?” Joe asked.
“Third-degree burns at the minimum,” Cutler said, businesslike.“Excruciating pain and skin grafts for the rest of your life. If you live, I mean. Worse, you’ll deface the thermal. But it would be nothing like if you actually fell into a hot springs or geyser.”
“What would happen?”
“You’d die instantly, of course; then your body would be boiled. I’ve seen elk and buffalo fall in over the years. Within a couple of hours, their hair comes off in clumps and the flesh separates from the bone. The skeleton sinks and the meat and fat cooks and it smells like beef stew. Sometimes, an animal body affects the stability of the thermal and it erupts and spits all that meat back out. Not pretty.”
“Maybe I should stay up here,” Joe said.
“Just step where I step,” Cutler said. “Not an inch either way and you’ll be fine. I’ve done this for years and I know where to walk and where not to walk.”
Joe felt a thrill being allowed to go where millions of tourists couldn’t go, and stepped over the railing. He wished Demming—or Marybeth—could see him now.
For the next hour, Cutler carefully removed coins and debris from the geysers and hot pools. Joe followed in his footsteps and gathered them and noted what was found in Cutler’s journal. Cutler explained how the underground plumbing system worked, how mysterious it was, how a geyser could simply stop erupting in one corner of the park and a new geyser could shoot up forty miles away as the result of a mild tremor or indiscerniblegeological tic. How the water that came from the geysershad been carbon-tested to reveal it was thousands of years old, that it had been whooshing through the underground works before Columbus landed in America and was just now being blasted into