"Cerveza," Bruce read off the can.
"You're welcome," Arthur replied.
 

Green Sun
Chapter 4 Prickly Pair

by Donna Lamb

The driver of the black SUV stopped on the top of a ridge and shut off his engine. Twice in the last month Bruce Martin had heard the distant sound of a small engine in the same area. Not a motorcycle engine, it had a different resonance, with a poppity cadence that made him think of his grandmother's old electric sewing machine.

Or an ultralite airplane.

Not that a tiny airplane would be involved in the sort of activity he hoped to find; a plane meant dope smugglers, probably. For his part, he'd cheerfully throw every drug pusher and dope smuggler into prison for life but his purpose out on the Sonora Desert didn't include the sort of quixotic impulse that would lead him into a confrontation with drug lords or their henchmen. He'd just as soon avoid them if he could.

Originally, he'd come to the Southwest as part of a contingent of the Border Regulation Committee. The Regulators believed, and Bruce had been convinced, that the tide of illegal aliens in the United States would eventually cause a serious threat to the Republic. Over the months of Regulator activity, he'd learned that many of his comrades had agendas that involved power and money in ways that had caused him to lose faith in their common ideals.

He still had faith, he just no longer believed that they did. Too much of the donations sent to the BRC had simply disappeared with no proper accounting and nothing but excuses offered as to why the accounting would not, could not and even, should not be done. Then he'd met an Indian in a dusty border town. His truck needed a part, a fancy belt to keep the power steering working. The other guys in his Regulation Group had spent the waiting time in the only bar the tiny town had to offer.

Bruce had walked out to the old mining railway that had been the town's original reason for existing, just sight-seeing. Under a cottonwood tree there he'd found Arthur Bullrush, a Native American of the Apache Nation. Arther had a little camp made, with a rock circle, an itty-bitty fire and a large restaurant-style tin can filled with venison chili. Some of the best chili Bruce ever had.

And some good company, too. Bruce had been ex-Army and Arthur, ex-Marine, but they'd had things to talk about. Like their mutual service in the original Gulf War; they'd actually been within a few miles of each other in camps outside Kuwait City.

"New War nothing like Our War," Arthur had said.

"Shit no," Bruce had agreed. Then they'd dropped that subject, sensing a deeper argument lurking in the shoals of their budding friendship.

They had scooped up chili with handmade tortillas Arthur had got from a Mexican lady in town. They drank beer from tall cans, a brand with a Spanish name Bruce had never heard of. "Cerveza," Bruce had read off the can.

"You're welcome," Arthur had replied and they'd both laughed as if it were the funniest joke they'd ever heard.

They were both big men with work-hardened hands who knew how to live in the near-wild, how to hunt and fish and how to cook what they killed. Arthur had black hair and nearly black eyes buried in sun wrinkles. Bruce had grey eyes and the sort of dark brown hair that turns red after a lot of sun. They could talk about a thousand things, sports, women, cars, military service--but they left the politics alone. Almost.

They laughed and talked and ate and drank most of the day away. In the cool of the late afternoon, Arthur had finally asked, "So you're with this Regulator Crew?"

"Well, yeah," Bruce had admitted.

Arthur chuckled.

Bruce felt defensive for some reason. "S'funny?" he'd asked.

Arthur smiled. "Well, we've both proved our bona fides, we're patriots and we've got the discharge papers to prove it. Neither of us had the bad luck to collect a lollipop but we put our skins on the line and we both know why we did it."

Bruce nodded.

"But you got to see the situation from an Indian point of view. All this hoo-raw over a few illegal aliens is pretty funny to us. Ironical, even." He smiled.

And Bruce had smiled back.

That's all it took. A week later, he'd quit the Regulators, gotten their stuff out of his truck and filled the back of the big SUV with blankets, water bottles and food packs. Then he'd gone hunting, looking for people who were lost in the desert with no food, no water and no shelter. He didn't care which direction they were going, people could die out there without a little help. Two more weeks, he figured and he'd have erased the time he'd spent on what he thought of as an honest mistake--then he could go back to his job with a clear conscience and hopes of finding solutions to national problems that didn't sound like the plot of a second-rate musical comedy.

Still, he had no desire for trouble with any drug cowboys so he scanned the horizon again, looking for a small plane. That's when he smelled the smoke.

* * *

Hobie Carson collected more than a few stickers from the prickly pears getting himself out of the burning plane. That broken stay wire that had finally tangled in the engine fairing had apparently also carved a slice through the double-walled plastic fuel tank. Leaking gas had somehow caught fire and the dried undergrowth below the green part of the beaver-tailed cactus burned fiercely.

Carson managed to get out with the medical kit, three bottles of water, a bag of gorp and his satellite phone and utility knife. Also first and second degree burns on his face, arms and legs to go with the stickers.

"At least I didn't lose any money on that ballistic parachute I thought of buying," he told himself. "I got the plane down not much harder than it would have landed with a $4000 recovery system. It's toast but that really happened to it in mid-air." He watched the fire for a moment, sad because of losing a friend, his plane.

The morning sun already felt hot on his burns so he found some shade behind the rocks he'd narrowly missed landing among. There he dressed the cut on his nose and slathered burn ointment and sunscreen on his face, hands and shins, then used a pair of tweezers to extract the worst of the stickers. He drank an entire bottle of water while doing this, knowing that it is better to carry water internally than externally on the desert.

Directly north of him, he knew from his last navigation reading in the plane, lay the touristy "ghost" town of Christmas Diggings, Arizona. The other two bottles of water would be enough for an estimated fifteen mile hike but maybe not in the middle of the day. Better to walk as much as he could before the day turned blistering, find some shade to wait out the heat and finish his hike in the cool of the evening. On the last Thursday in July, it probably wouldn't really cool off till nearly dark but he could start walking again around six.

His utility knife had a compass in the handle so he did not doubt he could keep a course but he spent some time on the north side of the rocks, picking out distant landmarks in the line of hills.

He didn't use his satellite phone right away because he didn't want any rescuers nosing around the wreckage of the plane. Just before he'd finally lost control, he'd pulled the quick release on the smuggler's pouch and dropped a hypothetical fortune in contraband drugs onto the desert floor. Maybe his employers would want to come back and look for it.

His burns hurt, his nose ached, he still itched from the cactus thorns and somewhere, somehow, he'd banged his left knee on something. He hoped it didn't swell up and slow him down too much. He pushed himself to his feet, his back still against the cool rock.

He grumbled under his breath a bit before starting out on his hike. Out loud, he said something like, "I wish someone would come along in a four-wheel drive and save me from having to walk out of here."

continued...